Sharon presses for fence across Sinai

A bedouin tracker helps and Israeli policeman near the frontier in the Sinai desert

Image 1 of 3

Image 1 of 3

Israel's security barrier locator graphic

By Tim Butcher in the Sinai Desert

12:01AM GMT 07 Dec 2005

Palestinian incursions into Israel across its Sinai Desert border with Egypt have led to a plan for a £200 million security fence.

Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, angered by his army's failure to stop the raids, has ordered his cabinet to consider the plan urgently. If it goes ahead, it will seal off the last big gap in Israel's perimeter, effectively surrounding the country with a ring of steel.

The scale of the Sinai security problem is all too evident, with an old, rusty fence swamped by shifting sand dunes. A bored Egyptian border guard steps over the fence, illegally entering Israel, for a chat.

"The fence is nothing," Samir says. "We have been told to stop people crossing but at night the frontier is too long and we are too few to make any difference."

Related Articles

The smuggling of cigarettes and other contraband, often on camels ridden by Bedouins whose tribal lands straddle the border, has been a long-term problem. But the recent arrest of three terrorist suspects from Gaza as they crossed the Sinai has raised the security threat dramatically.

Recent wars have ensured that Israel's borders with Lebanon and Syria are heavily fortified and monitored by United Nations peacekeepers.

Israel has a peace treaty with Jordan and the border is well guarded to stop incursions by Palestinians from the kingdom's population of 2.6 million refugees. The border with Gaza is protected by a sophisticated fence and the controversial West Bank barrier will be completed within months.

With its troops no longer guarding Gaza's border with Egypt after this summer's Israeli withdrawal, Mr Sharon is worried that terrorists from Gaza can slip into Egypt and cut through the Sinai. They can then double back, using Bedouin smugglers to guide them across the border into Israel, carrying weapons and explosives. Israeli forces caught three members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and their Bedouin escort last month. Many more are likely to have got through.

The threat risks ending the tranquil atmosphere of the few Israeli settlements that dot the desert frontier. In Ezuz, a tiny community of 15 families set up in the early 1980s next to an ancient oasis known as the Spring of Moses, there has been a clear change of mood.

"We have had smugglers through this area as long as we have been here," said Celia Friede, 47, a white Kenyan who chose to live in Ezuz because it reminded her of her desert childhood in east Africa. "It was all a bit of fun, really, like the time we stood on the hill and watched the police chase a jeep loaded with marijuana. We all caught a big whiff as it roared by in a cloud of dust."

But she said that since Israel completed its withdrawal from Gaza in September the number of security alerts and Israeli border patrols had increased.

Mrs Friede's husband, Dror, said: "The smugglers are business people, after all, and if all of a sudden it is more profitable for them to smuggle Palestinians across this border rather than cigarettes, it is inevitable they will smuggle Palestinians."

Israeli soldiers and border police have stepped up patrols, using Bedouin trackers to look for camel spoor and other trails in the sand to lead them to smugglers. But the border is 220 miles long and cannot be sealed completely.

If the plan for a fence is approved, it will block the overland route used for millennia by people leaving Africa. Israeli patrols often pick up African economic migrants wandering in the Sinai Desert.

Thousands of years ago it was the route used by Moses and the Jewish tribes leaving Egypt in search of the Promised Land.